With Drupal and React, IT Consultis has developed for Sugatsune an exclusive website called Interior Collection, featuring only its high-end product lines. This website helps Sugatsune attract more dealers and be more effective in promoting their products.

Established in 1930 in Tokyo, Sugatsune is committed to producing and distributing only the highest quality products. The Japanese brand specializes in manufacturing metal hardware for different purposes, including door architecture hardware, catches and latches, drawer slides, hinges, hooks, locks, etc. Every product made by Sugatsune is tailor-made by its architects, designers, and builders to bring only the best experience to their customers. The company is also well-known for initiating new solutions for architectures and has remained over the last 87 years the top choice for many buyers.

Nowadays, Sugatsune has established 16 offices worldwide, produced more than 20,000 different unique items and exported their products to 80 different countries around the world, making them a true leader in their industry.

THE CHALLENGE

Although the company has built its brand throughout a long history, Sugatsune understands that today its online presence plays an essential role in its business’ success.

Therefore, Sugatsune decided to develop from scratch an exclusive website called “Interior Collection", which features only high-end products to target a niche segment. To achieve this goal, they required a new luxury-oriented website, paired with a strong management system of database and SEO-oriented.

Sugatsune had two main objectives for their Interior collection:

Attractively present their high-end products and express their unique characteristics

Appeal to dealers or distributors and encourage them to join the B2B section in order to promote Sugatsune products via more channels in China.

THE SOLUTION

Interior Collection is built with 3 main users in mind, a fact which drove the direction for the technical development. These users are:

Normal users: the website allows them to easily browse the Product Catalog, add their favorite products to a cached “Wishlist", find the nearest distributor having available products, and submit a contact form to the distributor.

Distributors: they can manage their profile pages in the platform, control their product catalog and inventory, and make their contact form for customers.

Admins: they can have the management of their store pages, including catalog database, product inventory and inquiries submitted by customers.​

Drupal 8 was chosen to be the content management system for back-end development, in order to build a responsive website supporting 2 languages: English and Chinese. Drupal 8 has been well-known for its scalability, and its easy-to-manage, flexible content delivery; these reasons make it a perfect fit for this website. As one of the best CMS around, Drupal makes SEO management more effective, therefore helping Sugatsune reach more prospects.

Regarding the front-end, React was selected thanks to its flexibility and ability to create interactive user interfaces, with plenty of clean and reusable code.

In addition, an API is used to connect front-end and back-end, ensuring that the website performs smoothly and responds to content navigation in the fastest possible way, facilitating the process of leading users to the product page and looking for the nearest distributor.

As the website focuses on high-end products, it is essential that Sugatsune pays attention to the detailed description of its goods. Every product image is of the highest resolution, together with a zoom-in function.

Users can select products and add them to the Wishlist, in which they are able to see the prices and the distributor information. Besides, customers are also provided social buttons to easily share the product information with their friends via WeChat, QQ or Weibo.

THE RESULT

Thanks to its well-developed backend and a high-end feeling, this new website greatly contributes to the success of Sugatsune in attracting a large number of customers, dealers, and distributors to spread its products’ presence and availability. By being very user-friendly, it also helps them easily update their product list, control the inventory, and manage customer information. Sugatsune is now more than ready to conquer this segment of high-end users, capture interest of dealers/distributors to join their B2B business and elevate their business.